Less than 12 hours after polls closed on Super Tuesday, the press corps covering John McCain gathered in a hangar at Swift Aviation in Phoenix, Arizona, for another press conference. The focus, as it had been for more than a week, was on one question: How will John McCain repair the breach with the conservatives who have been so vociferously critical of his candidacy?
Reporters were obsessed with it. The McCain campaign was not. For weeks, McCain advisers had spoken with confidence about the inevitable coalescing around their man once he became the presumptive nominee.
Senator Lindsey Graham arrived as reporters waited. Graham is McCain’s closest friend in the Senate and a trusted adviser. He is very quotable and very willing to be quoted, so reporters flock to him. Informal chats become impromptu press conferences.
And so it was last Wednesday, a few minutes after 9 A.M. As Graham started to answer questions, reporters pulled out their notebooks and turned on their audio recorders. Soon, television cameras and their bright lights were trained on Graham’s face as he praised McCain for his leadership and made a case that McCain will be a strong nominee.
McCain, Graham said, will be able to present a “conservatism that is not a threat, that will be attractive to Reagan Democrats and independents.” It was a telling description. Just as George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” bothered some conservatives–aren’t most conservatives compassionate?–selling McCain as the nonthreatening conservative implies that other conservatives are threatening.
Moments later Joe Lieberman arrived. Some of the reporters hovering around Graham wandered over to Lieberman. The Connecticut senator, a former Democrat, said the key to a McCain victory would be his bipartisan appeal. “The important thing to win this election is to win the majority of independents and some Democrats. Senator McCain is a devoted Republican, but has always worked across party lines.”
McCain walked up next, looking relaxed. He was wearing a navy sport coat, gray dress slacks, and a blue shirt without a tie. As always, McCain patiently tried to take a question from any reporter who wanted to ask one. He struck some conservative notes. He boasted of his “fundamental conservative philosophy” and said raising taxes would be “the worst thing we could do to our economy.”
But many of his answers sounded the same bipartisan theme that had emerged from the exchanges with Graham and Lieberman. I used my question to press him on one possible source of the mistrust between McCain and movement conservatives: his demeanor.
McCain had just defended his record by citing his high ratings from the conservative groups Citizens Against Government Waste and Citizens for a Sound Economy. I suggested we stipulate that his record is more conservative than some of his critics have claimed. Then I asked McCain about the perception that he enjoys sticking his fingers in the eyes of conservatives when he disagrees with them–while he takes pleasure in working with Democrats. McCain didn’t address the first claim and defended himself against the second.
“The most compelling moment in all this campaign in many respects–not all, many–was standing on the stage with Joe Lieberman,” he said. McCain highlighted his willingness to work with Democrats and touted his ability to work “across the aisle” as a strength. Conservatives, he said, appreciate it, too. “One thing I’m convinced of, without a doubt, is that conservatives are glad when Joe Lieberman and I worked together in establishing the 9/11 Commission and then moved and got many of their recommendations into law.”
Setting aside that specific claim (I’m not convinced he is right), McCain’s answer was interesting because it seemed to affirm the premise of the question. And one major difference between McCain and other conservatives is that he sees bipartisanship as both a means to an end and an end in itself. Most conservatives do not.
There were other differences, too, and they would be heavily scrutinized the following day, in what would be McCain’s biggest speech of the campaign so far.
As former senator George Allen spoke from the podium at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington last Thursday, offering his surprise endorsement of McCain’s presidential bid shortly before the Arizona senator took the stage, a McCain advance staffer in a sharp navy blue suit quietly approached the CPAC dignitaries sitting in the first two rows of chairs in the cavernous ballroom. “I’m going to need you all to move,” the McCain aide said. “Those seats are reserved for the congressmen and senators supporting Senator McCain.”
No one budged.
At their feet was the detritus of an eventful morning–an empty Starbucks cup, a copy of the Washington Times, a brochure for the conservative website Townhall.com, and a discarded pair of fully inflated red “Mitt Romney” thunderstix.
To the surprise and disappointment of many in the crowd, Romney had used his speech earlier in the day to drop out of the race for the Republican nomination. Even as he did so, his supporters urged him to continue, with shouts of “Fight on!” ringing out while Romney spoke. Before Romney, Vice President Dick Cheney had spoken, to even more enthusiastic applause. Cheney had received a long standing ovation when he was introduced and again as he defended the Bush administration’s most controversial policies. “And would I support those same decisions today? You’re damn right I would,” he said. “The absence of another 9/11 is not an accident,” Cheney added. “It is an achievement.”
The difficult task for the afternoon speaker, then, would be to move a largely Dick Cheney crowd to support a John McCain Republican. And the equally difficult immediate task for the McCain aide was to move the CPAC VIPs–wearing “Diamond” and “Co-Sponsor” badges that indicated their relative importance–from their seats at the front of the room.
“I’m serious. Y’all have to move, now.”
Nothing.
“They’re for members of Congress.”
Still quiet. Then someone shouted, “We paid for these seats!”
McCain’s aide, realizing his predicament, huddled with a CPAC organizer. They fetched a dozen chairs from the kitchen and the holding room just to the left of the stage and began to create a new section for the McCain campaign VIPs, alongside the conservative activists who had been there all day.
Among the conservatives who took their places in the new McCain section were elected officials who would have been comfortable–more comfortable than McCain himself–in the CPAC crowd: former Solicitor General Ted Olson; Arizona senator Jon Kyl; former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating; Mississippi representative Chip Pickering; and Kansas senator Sam Brownback. Also with McCain, sitting nearby, was California representative Dan Lungren. After George Allen endorsed McCain, Tom Coburn, perhaps the most conservative member of the Senate, introduced him.
It’s possible to make too much of the seating squabble. Still, it was revealing. There is little doubt the CPACers would have moved for, say, Dick Cheney’s intimates–not to mention, in an earlier day, Ronald Reagan’s.
Coburn acknowledged that he and other conservatives have fought with McCain on judges, immigration, and campaign finance reform. But, said Coburn, “the concerns I hear about John McCain pale in comparison to the two greatest challenges facing our country: terrorism and a Congress that refuses to correct our unsustainable fiscal course.”
When McCain spoke, he emphasized those points. He framed the race as an argument “about hugely consequential things,” with significant differences between his views and those of the remaining Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “Senator Clinton and Senator Obama want to increase the size of the federal government. I intend to reduce it,” he said. And later: “Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I intend to cut them.”
He was particularly forceful on Iraq and the broader war.
These are but a few of the differences that will define this election. They are very significant differences, and I promise you, I intend to contest these issues on conservative grounds and fight as hard as I can to defend the principles and positions we share, and to keep this country safe, proud, prosperous, and free.
McCain’s top adviser, Mark Salter, the coauthor of several McCain books, had stayed in Phoenix an extra day to blend the many drafts of this speech into a cohesive and sometimes powerful text. McCain’s team had been working on it for more than ten days, beginning even before McCain had formally accepted the invitation to address CPAC. Just hours before the speech was to be delivered, the McCain team learned from the cable news networks that Mitt Romney would be dropping out. They made appropriate last minute tweaks, including the softening of some language that could have been seen as criticism of Romney. (In his stump speeches, McCain used to point out that he opposed a $20 billion “bailout” of the auto industry in Michigan, something Romney favored. At CPAC, McCain spoke vaguely of favoring market-based solutions.)
The result was a rousing, well-crafted call for conservatives to join his campaign. And if not all of the CPAC VIPs in the front of the room were ready to volunteer for McCain, they slowly warmed to him over the course of the address. Two women in the third row who had refused to clap when McCain was introduced applauded reluctantly when he criticized Senate Democrats for blocking legislation to extend FISA reform.
Former House majority leader Tom DeLay stood to the side of the stage for most the speech with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. But even DeLay managed a few half-hearted claps when McCain promised to appoint conservative judges.
After the speech, DeLay criticized McCain. “The problem that conservatives have with him is his record,” DeLay said, adding that one speech cannot obscure that bigger issue. But when I asked him if he had ruled out a vote for McCain, DeLay said rather emphatically that he had not. Coming from one who previously said McCain had “done more to hurt the Republican party than any elected official I know of,” that’s progress.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
